Improve your review process with PMD

Do you spend lot of time to review your code? Does it feel like unnecessary work? Would you like to get rid of boring and unproductive manual review process or start reviewing your code easily? Here is one effective solution to replace the manual review process: Tool called PMD.

I have studied the effectiveness of the manual and automated review process. Automated review was conducted with tool called PMD. It is an easy to use plugin for many IDEs that review your Java code and finds potential problems to be fixed. It finds example possible bugs, dead code, suboptimal code, etc.

Following table summarizes the findings:

	Manual review	Automated review
Time	120 min	5 min
Relative hourly cost	100	100
Relative cost	200	8.33
Problems found	29	31
Relative cost/problem	6.9	0.27
Priority points	88	95
Relative cost/point	2.27	0.09
Lines of code	201	201
Rows/problem	6.9	6.5

As table shows, automated review could be 25 times more effective than manual review. It found almost same number of problems than five person manual review with same priorities. If automated review can be made 25 times faster with same kind of results, it is obvious that it should be used instead.

My suggestion is that you leave your manual review process until you have fixed all problems found with PMD. After that you can find advanced problems with manual review like logic problems. And PMD is also very good solution to begin the review process to improve your product quality. So why don't you give it a try?